Thursday, 22 November 2012

Ancient civilizations gave us the names of planets in our solar system. But as modern scientists have zoomed in on these bodies and their moons, they needed to find names for ever more features on their surfaces.

But sometimes it seems that astronomers get a little tired of always asking their mythology friends for new pantheons to mine for names. Scientists are, after all, just as geeky as any other nerd subculture and they like to stamp the solar system with lesser-known minutiae from their favorite books or devote a crater to a scientific hero.